Lego robots from Garnes come to Goiesti

In May, the First Lego League team RoboMech travels to Goiesti to learn the tricks of building and controlling Lego robots so that their Romanian peers qualify for the First Lego League.

TEXT AND PHOTO: MAGNE REIGSTAD

At Garnes school, the course is practiced with students in 5th grade as participants and students in 6th grade as course assistants. The students are very talented, thought our people in Romania - Luminita Dinca, Luminita Cirloganescu and Carmen Constatin. The other day they were visiting our fantastic supporter in Arna, and here they got a small demo of what both children and robots can accomplish.

Both the students at Garnes skule and Robo Mech participate every year in the FLL tournament at VilVite in Bergen, where both teams have reaped honor and glory. The students at Garnes assure us that this is something their peers in Goiesti will take quickly, not least because it is so much fun.

Trond Skutlaberg at Garnes skule is, together with Runar Eikhaug at Ulsmåg school, team leader on the FLL team RoboMech. Both are responsible for the First Lego League programs at their schools. Skutlaberg never has problems motivating students. They like to work on solving the tangles even after school, and according to some of them this is at least as much fun as football.

Over 300,000 children and young people in 80 countries take part in the major worldwide competitions. These are first-class tools for promoting good collaboration, and the understanding of programming is something students need in adulthood.

Along one wall in the classroom is a row of laptops, and here the young engineers have to come in to program the robots to drive, turn and stop in the right place. The robots roll off in a bin with painted lines, and here it is important to enter the correct values on the PC so that the robots do not start on their own and do damage to themselves or others in the robot bin.

Skutlaberg says that the actual Lego parts for the kits are quite affordable, and that you do not need very powerful PCs to program and control them.

Once the basic work is done in Romania, RoboMech and the students at Garnes and Ulsmåg will follow up on their friends - and perhaps future competitors, via Skype.

Going to Goiesti brings both computers and robots. Luminita Dinca - our general manager in Craiova, say those in the south who want to volunteer with IT-savvy people. The participants at RoboMech who join are aged 10-14 years.

Garnes has collaborated with the Adina Foundation since 2008, and the funds from the action days in Arna help some of the poorest children in Europe. Saturday 20 February is this year's action day for the benefit of the Adina Foundation's work in Romania.